UKH

It was too windy yesterday to take the group of kids to see the seal colony. So instead we pulled up the buoys and looked at what was living on them. This one was particularly pretty 🙂

Beautiful! When I was about 16, I was torn between pursuing marine biology or music as a career. Music won, which I´ve never regretted, but pictures like this still give me pangs nearly 50 years later

Are those spiky things sea urchins? And are they eating the shellfish?

They are baby sea urchins, only about 1cm across. I'm not sure if they are eating the mussels or just latching on alongside to grow. I like to think it's the latter, I certainly told the kids it was! Lol

The urchins are Green or Shore Sea Urchins. They are much smaller than the Common (pink coloured) Urchin, typically only growing to about 5cm across. They'll eat pretty much anything but I would guess these ones are perhaps scraping algae off the mussel shells.

The white things below them look like Dead Men's Fingers, a type of soft coral.

I thought they might be sea squirts.

I've had a look through a couple of the Seasearch books, "Sea Squirts and Sponges of Britain and Ireland" and "Sea Anemones and Corals of Britain and Ireland".

I'm going to stick with Dead Men's Fingers but I'm certainly not any sort of expert regarding marine animals and am happy to be corrected.

The Seasearch books are really good for this sort of stuff but are somewhat specialist publications.

They certainly squirted when pressed, much to the amusement of the kids! We were under the impression that they are sea squirts.

Thanks, good info!

Fair enough, I'm happy to go with that.